On Nov 9-11th, a group of 5 students attended the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Mid-Southeast Chapter Fall Conference. At the conference, students may enter a paper presentation competition which gives undergraduate students and graduate students an opportunity to gain recognition by presenting their work.

Each student is given a 20 minute time slot in which to present his/her research. Judges will be present in the audience and the contestants will be graded on clarity, content, organization. The best presentations are awarded a plaque and a small cash award in each category. This year there were 6 awards in the Undergraduate category, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 3 Honorable Mentions.

There were 32 Undergraduate presentations along with many Master and Ph.D. student presentations. Four students from High Point University entered the competition with the following presentation titles:

Samantha Allen - Improving the Ranking System for the U.S. Census Bureau -
research from an REU last summer.

Christian Weigandt and Thomas Langford - Using Bump Technology in an
Economics Simulation Tool - (Kevin Sanders is part of this group but did
not attend the conference)

Zachary Shore - Real-Time Physics Simulation in a Cube-Based Game World

Some of the other Universities participating in the competition include Columbus State University, Armstrong Atlantic State University, University of Tennessee-Martin, Samford University and UNC Asheville.

"I thought the HPU presentations were excellent," says Roger Shore, associate professor of Mathematics and Computer Science who serves as the advisor to some of the students. "It was an invaluable experience for our students." Apparently the judges agreed. HPU won 3 of the 6 undergraduate awards. We took 1st, 2nd, and a Honorable Mention.

Samantha Allen - 1st place

Christian Weigandt and Thomas Langford- 2nd place

Zachary Shore- Honorable Mention

2011-11-05 - ACM Mid-Atlantic Region Programming Contest

A group of 12 select students from High Point University's Mathematics and Computer Science Department recently had the chance to exercise their brain power for representatives from IBM by competing in the 36th annual IBM-sponsored Association for Computing Machinery Collegiate programming contest- better known as "The Battle of the Brains." The regional competition was held at Duke University on Nov. 5.

HPU was up against 165 teams from top schools around the region, including Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Lafayette College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University - all competing for a chance to attend the World Finals roster, which will be held in Warsaw, Poland. Only 100 teams world-wide will compete in the final contest.

Each team of three students was given eight problems to solve in five hours using only one computer. The problem set was difficult, and only six teams solved more than three problems. Ultimately, HPU ranked 47th out of 165 schools, putting them in the top 28 percent of teams participating.

"The ACM contest is a prestigious contest," says Roger Shore, associate professor of mathematics and computer science who serves as adviser to the HPU teams. "We hand select students from HPU to participate. The contest fosters creativity, teamwork and innovation in building new software programs."

HPU has participated in the competition since Shore arrived at HPU in 1988.

2010-05-17 - Thomas Brinegar completes Summer Internship

Thomas Brinegar joined Beacon Technologies as an intern web software developer in June.

Beacon Technologies is a web marketing and development company founded in 1997 geared towards small and large scale web projects. Since working for Beacon, he has assisted in developing web sites for Sealy Mattress Corporation, Texas A&M, and burton+Burton.

Upon returning to HPU for his Junior year this semester, he has stayed with Beacon doing content development. Thomas is thrilled to be a part of the team there and maintains a passion for the Internet and web development.

Three Computer Science students will be spending their summer utilizing and advancing their skills in research programs and internships.

Andrew Proctor, a rising Senior, will be at an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates
(REU) Site program on Pervasive and Mobile Computing to be held at Auburn
University. This is an 8-week program in which students will study with a professor at Auburn University. Most students will have the opportunity to continue their work into the Fall semester where they will complete their work and publish a paper.

Aaron Robinson, a rising Senior, will be spending his summer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA. He will be working with Dr. Anuj Shah in the area of bioinformatics. While the specifics are still up in the air, the research will involve sub cellular localization using Scalar Vector Machines, data formats and scientific data management in mass spectrometry.

Alex Palmer, a rising Sophomore, will be interning with SpringBoard Networks in Toronto, Ontario. His internship will include developing, testing, and debugging applications for their computer shopping cart and iPhone/Touch/Pad.

The department of Mathematics and Computer Science at High Point University was awarded a grant from the CUDA Teaching Program at Nvidia Corporation. The grant includes five GeForce GTX 260 graphic processors. Each processor contains 896 megabytes of memory and 192 streaming processors. According to the NVidia website, an owner of one of these graphic cards would, "Experience high definition worlds, lifelike characters, and forces of nature so powerful that your palms sweat and your heart races with every frame. Beyond games, watch Blu-ray movies and transcode video up to 7X faster than traditional CPUs1."

The department plans on using the cards in a different capacity than the normal user. In the Fall 2010 semester, a new course will be offered titled CSC-4310 High Performance Computing. The underlying focus of the High Performance Computing course will be to explore the suitability of various parallel architectures for implementing cellular automata, genetic and combinatorial optimaztion algorithms. The GeForce GTX 260 with 192 cores coupled with the Nvidia's CUDA technology will be exploited in this course as well as our upper level, graphically intense coruses.

The department would like to thank a couple of individuals for alerting the department about the Nvidia Program. Specifically, thanks to Dr. Robert Geist, Professor at Clemson University and Mr. Zachary Jones, PhD student at Clemson University and alumnus from High Point University.

A team of Computer Science students from High Point University win 3rd place in the 2010 Triad Programming Contest held on April 10th. Three teams from High Point University competed with other teams from Universities in the Triad.

Each team is presented with 8-10 word problems that must be solved using either the C++ or Java programming language. To solve one of the problems, students must utilize knowledge from areas such as Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics and Business.

The A team is composed of 3 students. Each team is given one computer and 4 hou
rs to work. The team that has solved the most problems, wins the competition.

The competition, which took place on Nov. 7 at Duke University, tested each team's math knowledge by giving them eight problems to solve within five hours.

Several universities from the region took part in the competition alongside HPU, including Christopher Newport, Duke University, Howard University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, Radford University, Shippensburg University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Washington College and Wilkes University. HPU has participated in the event yearly since 1989.

2009-04-14 - HPU Computer Science Team Wins First Place at Programming Competition

A team of computer science students from High Point University took first place in a programming competition held at A&T University on April 4. The competition was sponsored by Math Strategies, Inc., and Intuit, Inc.

Each team of three was presented with a collection of seven computational problems to solve within a specified period of time. Solutions had to be written in either Java or C++ programming languages.

Thirteen teams representing four institutions participated in the competition, including A&T University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Guilford Technical Community College. HPU took first place by solving five of the seven problems in three hours. UNCG came in second, with four correct solutions, and GTCC was third, with three correct solutions.

The first-place team from HPU included students Bill Frasure, Aaron Robinson and Andrew Proctor. The team was awarded $300 from Math Strategies and software from Intuit.